ANITA KLEIN | EVERYDAY DIVINITY

Anita Klein, Peonies (2022), Acrylic on canvas, 760 x 610 mm. Courtesy of Eames Fine Art

It would be easy to walk past an Anita Klein work, without paying it the scrutiny it deserves.

On the face of it, her subject matter is quotidian, familial, twee even. A dark-haired, early-middle-aged female figure is usually involved in some sort of activity with her friends or family: planting seedlings; playing snakes and ladders; swimming in the rain, stirring sugar into an espresso.

Her eyes shine; her face is lit with a beatific smile. The main subject of Anita Klein’s ouevre, over several decades, has been Anita Klein herself. But (like the Madonna) she never ages, beyond her prime.

There’s something monumental about the figuration: Tamara de Lempicka-as-housewife, maybe, or Picasso in his podgy-lady phase. And then there’s the composition. The figures are artfully positioned within the frame, instructing the viewer’s eye-journey, as if planned by a Renaissance master. Once you realise this, you sense that these modern-day figures are akin to passers-by who’ve happened upon a momentous episode in the life of Christ, as depicted by Masaccio, or Fra Filippo Lippi. 

When you hear Klein talk about her practice, you realise this is no coincidence. She studied fine art at Chelsea and the Slade, and lives part-time in Tuscany: she is heavily influenced by the work of late-medieval Italian frescoists.  

Understand this, and you get what she’s up to: Klein is transposing the divine onto the everyday. The simple pleasures that make life worthwhile, so fleeting, so easily forgotten, which constitute the building blocks of family love. Moments, she points out, that went missing during lockdown.

There’s no edginess about it: Lucian Freud it ain’t. A priest once told her ‘I want my sermons to be like your pictures’, which says a lot. Klein is a painter who counts her blessings, and invites you to do the same. Is there a more positive-spirited British artist at work today?

Anita Klein will be at Eames Fine Art, Stand 36, on Friday September 30, to talk about her work and her major retrospective at the London gallery in October. 100 collectors’-edition signed copies of the book Anita Klein: Out of the Ordinary, Forty Years of Printmaking will be on sale (with one of two new signed linocuts) and Anita will make a personal dedication to anyone buying the book (£380).